Stranger in Camelot

  “Working on your ranch would be different from anything I do at home. I’d enjoy myself if you’d stop worrying about it.”

  “Gee, maybe when I’ve known you for a long time—like maybe a week—I’ll feel foolish for feeling uncomfortable.”

  “Time has nothing to do with it,” he said, his voice becoming gruff. He put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed lightly. His expression was troubled as he watched her. “A day, a week, a decade, a hundred decades—what difference does it make? We have all the time we need.”

  She wanted to ask, For what? but she was afraid. She might like his answer.

  “I’ll help you with the fence,” he repeated. “After we feed your horses, see about my Jeep, and have breakfast. All right?”

  “All right.”

  “And then, if you’ll tell me where to find another campground, I’ll move out of your barn.” He studied her expression carefully. “If you still want me to leave.”

  She struggled in a silent war with herself. Thirty-one years of hard experience said to keep him as far away as possible; the past few hours of intense companionship told her to hang on to him for dear life.

  Aggie clasped the sore bump on her forehead. “I’m still scrambled. Let me think about it.”

  “That’s all I ask, Agnes.” He looked pleased.

  Nothing was going the way it should. She was pleased too.

  John traded his rented Jeep for another one, then let Agnes buy him breakfast at a diner overlooking Matanzas Bay and the historic section of St. Augustine, where the massive, gray Castillo de San Marcos still loomed over the bay’s entrance, as it had since the 1600s. He loved the feel of the city, with its Spanish styles and aging Victorian opulence. Having grown up in a city where the past was a living force, he couldn’t scoff at Agnes Hamilton’s affection for her own city.

  He liked listening to her chirpy Southern voice as she told him about local history. He liked seeing her eyes light up with pleasure. What was so wrong with that? The scene this morning with that crone, Ida Roberts, had made him feel like snuggling Agnes inside his arms and promising that he’d never let anyone call her names again. Even if she had possession of his inheritance, and even if she had a reputation as notorious as his own—and might have been given it unfairly, he was beginning to believe—Agnes deserved to enjoy herself. He was willing to admit that it thrilled him to make her smile.

  “How did you get those scars on your knuckles?” she asked, pointing to the network of fine white lines on his right hand.

  “They’re sports-related,” he said vaguely.

  “Let me guess. I know! Fencing. I can picture you doing an Errol Flynn routine with one of those long thin swords.”

  “I may not have heard of Annette and Frankie, but I do know about Errol Flynn. It wasn’t quite like that.”

  “But you got those scars in fencing tournaments. I knew it.” She nodded sagely. “And how’d you get that little oval scar on the front of your neck?”

  John stared at her in dismay. Why not tell her the kind of story she wanted to hear? “I splattered hot oil on myself during a business trip to the Orient. I was in an antiques shop examining oil lamps. I collect them.”

  Agnes sighed in admiration. Exactly what she’d expected, her smile said. “Tell me more,” she urged.

  His stomach twisted with disgust. He’d never collected any kind of art or antiques, unless one considered cheap detective novels and photos of famous London criminals. His scars were from street fights.

  She appeared to believe everything he said. Watching her prop her intelligent, rosy-cheeked face on one hand as she listened to him, never looking away, her beautiful eyes trying to trust him, did a nasty thing to his appetite. Guilt replaced it, poking him in the stomach until all he could swallow were sips of his weak American coffee and a few bites of fried egg.

  She probably had his inheritance stashed somewhere, damn her. And she had to know it was stolen. Even though she wasn’t the one who’d pilfered it during the war almost fifty years ago, she was the one who stood to benefit from the theft.

  There was no reason to feel guilty for doing whatever it took to worm the truth out of her. Worm. He felt like a worm. Very well. So he could live with himself, anyway.

  He remembered as a boy watching his father cheat at a card game with the stable hands. The manager of the Bennington stables getting drunk and cheating his own workers!

  His father was despised by the men who worked for him, but they were too much in awe of him to complain to the estate’s lord. They took out their frustrations by tormenting John. He’d learned to fight, to work harder than everyone else, and to dissect human nature.

  Those skills had saved him from the streets. He’d earned sergeant’s rank in the army. Then he’d gone to college, and by the time he turned twenty-five he was on his way to becoming a detective with Scotland Yard. Until last year, he’d been one of their best.

  He’d played by the rules, and the rules had betrayed him. So this time he’d make up his own rules. Six months ago a London rare-book broker had tracked him down after being contacted by Sam Hamilton. John had listed his family’s books in Scotland Yard’s records of stolen art objects. The dealer had checked the records because the books Hamilton wanted him to sell were so valuable.

  John wondered what would have happened if he’d come here then, while Sam Hamilton was still alive. At John’s request, the dealer hadn’t warned Hamilton. He’d told him that he needed to see the books before he agreed to represent them, and Hamilton refused.

  John had planned to pay Hamilton a surprise visit, but then his life had come apart at the seams. Betrayal. Accusations that he’d taken bribes from the terrorist organizations he’d been assigned to infiltrate. A trial. A conviction. Three months in prison. The end of his career and reputation. And Sam Hamilton had died of a heart attack in the meantime.

  After all that, getting the books from Agnes Hamilton ought to be a piece of cake. He wasn’t going to let desire get in the way.

  Let her believe he was some kind of knight in shining armor. Let her believe that lie.

  Four

  By the time they began rebuilding the pasture fence that afternoon, John knew she wouldn’t ask him to leave. He could see the gratitude and affection blazing behind her troubled blue eyes. John covered his guilty eyes with absurdly conservative black sunglasses to protect himself from her scorching attention and the semitropical sun. Her attention was hotter, no contest.

  At first he made pleasant small talk when he wasn’t cutting the oak apart with a chain saw. But she gave one-word answers and worked as swiftly as a lumberjack. A dangerous female lumberjack, John thought with exasperation. It was hell to concentrate on handling a chain saw when Agnes’s peach-shaped rump strained against her shorts each time she bent over.

  Her hands were covered in thick leather gloves, and perspiration shone like a crystal veneer on her face and arms as she chopped at small tree branches with a hatchet and carried off the big chunks that fell from the chain saw’s whirring blade. She sucked her lower lip when she was concentrating hard, and she gave the tree limbs orders under her breath.

  So many small things about her delighted him. It seemed silly to love the coconut scent of her suntan lotion, or enjoy her ferocious attitude toward the tree.

  At any minute he expected her to wrap her arms around a thick limb and wrestle it. Soon her legs below her baggy brown shorts were stained with grime, bits of broken leaves, and thin pink scratches. She didn’t seem to notice or care.

  “Do you tackle all your work this way?” he asked finally. He let the chain saw idle, liking the raw power of it humming in his hands. When he looked up at Agnes he felt a similar humming inside him, just as unadorned and powerful, deep in his blood. She was a helluva fighter, his Agnes. His Agnes. Taking a breath to clear that notion from his thoughts, he watched her put a hand to her ear and shake her head.

  He cut the saw’s motor a little more and called cheerful
ly above the sound, “I’d like to see you in a garden taming thorny roses.”

  “You have a rose garden?” she yelled back as she dragged away a limb.

  Damn. That kind of question forced him to do gymnastics with his answer. “Only a small garden. At my place in the city.” John coughed. The only garden he had was the withered brown fern he’d left on the fire escape outside his flat’s back door.

  “You’ve got a town house?”

  John cursed silently. More gymnastics. “Something like that.”

  She dropped the limb alongside others in a pile to be burned, then put her gloved hands on her hips and gave him and his vague answer a sardonic look. Her luscious hips, like her attitude, were provocative. John gunned the saw’s engine and smiled at her.

  “Keep sassing me, Mr. Bartholomew, and I’ll jam your motor.”

  He turned the motor off, hoping to win a few more minutes of her entertaining conversation. “I never sass beautiful women who carry battle-axes.”

  She nodded and patted the hatchet, which she’d hung from a tool belt around her waist. “Smart man.” She went back to work, latching on to a new limb with both hands. “So you’ve got a London town house with a rose garden, huh? Where do you keep the yacht and the Rolls?”

  “No yacht. And I drive an ordinary old car.” That, at least, was entirely true.

  “Let me guess. You look like a Ferrari man. Classy but not conservative.”

  He muttered under his breath and gave up. “That’s me. A Ferrari. Sleek, fast, and powerful.”

  “I knew it!” She looked heavenward. “He says he drives ‘an ordinary old car,’ ” she drawled wryly, shaking her head. “There ain’t no such thang as an ‘old Ferrari.’ An old Ferrari is a classic Ferrari.”

  “Well, all right,” he said, defeated. “It’s a classic Ferrari.”

  “I know about Ferraris.” She jerked a branch free and tossed it toward the pile. Her voice became somber, the playful drawl gone. “My dad had a couple. Used to let me cruise around Los Angeles in one, when I got my first driver’s license. What a car!”

  “Tell me more about your parents.”

  She shook her head and kept talking. “What year is your Ferrari?”

  John considered her slowly. She wasn’t ever going to tell him about her parents, he suspected. He knew why. He’d researched them along with her. Over the years they’d gambled away all the money she made in television, mismanaged her trust fund, and left her broke when her career faded. A year after she turned twenty-one they’d died in a car accident near Las Vegas.

  He knew from personal experience how terrible growing up with irresponsible parents could be. He wished he could assure her he understood her shame.

  “John?”

  “Hmmm?” He blinked swiftly and tried to remember what she’d asked him.

  “Your Ferrari. What model is it?”

  He searched his mind for information on Ferraris. If she’d asked him about classic guns or knives, he could have told her volumes. But no. She wanted to chat about Ferraris! “It’s one of those late-sixties models, I think.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I never get a chance to drive it.”

  “You don’t drive at all? Oh, I should have known! I bet you also have a big Mercedes sedan and a chauffeur. Right?”

  This was an impossible conversation. John thought about simply dropping the chain saw, leaping over the tree trunk between him and Agnes, and kissing her until she stopped asking questions.

  He began chuckling wearily. She’d probably take the hatchet to him.

  Agnes shot him a puzzled look. “What’s funny?”

  “The way you’re figuring out my lifestyle.”

  “Was I right about the car and chauffeur?”

  “Close enough.”

  “You’ve got class. Yeah, I can see it.”

  John frowned. If this kindhearted bird saw where he really lived and what he drove, she’d definitely threaten him with the hatchet.

  “Well, class isn’t a matter of fine homes or cars,” he told her. “For example, I think you look very classy right now. As if you should be sitting around a campfire in the mountains with a glass of wine in one hand.”

  Soft peals of laughter came from her. “You are a bonafide sweet-talkin’ man.”

  “Is that good?”

  “The jury’s still out on it.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I haven’t decided about you yet.”

  “Ah. Hmmm. When you start dropping the g’s off your words and speaking with honey in your vowels, you sound dangerous.”

  “Yeah. It’s a warnin’ sign. Means you’re hearing the real me.”

  He recalled the episodes of The Jones Family he’d watched at the television archives of a university here in the States. Checking out her background had been one of his first goals. The television comedy show had been awful, complete nonsense. But redheaded little Agnes, who couldn’t have been more than eight or nine at the time, had been charming. Not a very good actress, but lovable.

  “I assume you didn’t speak with an accent when you worked in television,” he said nonchalantly.

  “No way. No casting agent in California wanted a kid with a drawl.” She put a hand to her throat and drew her shoulders back formally, then spoke in a crisp, unaccented voice, exaggerating the sounds. “So I learned to e-nun-ci-ate and mod-u-late and speak like ev-er-y other me-di-ocre TV kid.”

  “Fascinating. You’re a different person when you do that.”

  She shrugged, melted back into her casual self, and returned to the tree-limb attack. “I was a different person.”

  “But not me-di-ocre, I’m sure.”

  When she glanced at him uncertainly and frowned, he knew she was uncomfortable. “I have to get to my job at the pub in about two hours,” she announced. “We better stop talking and fix this fence.”

  He nodded and went back to work. But he couldn’t stop watching her, and he couldn’t ignore the pleasant sense of friendship growing inside him. And it was great to feel his muscles tighten and flex smoothly. There was something primitive and exciting about working in partnership with Agnes, both of them sweating and straining around the fence posts, sharing the spring day and the singing insects and the warm, earthy scents of the grassy land.

  He wished she weren’t so intent on seeing him as a pampered London businessman. She would certainly have doubts about his elite background if he told her how to pull the hog wire tighter or why the posts would set better with a little more dirt around them. He wasn’t supposed to know about those things.

  He’d even had to pretend ignorance about the chain saw, looking solemn when she repeated the safety precautions several times. She didn’t know that he’d grown up in a dingy flat over a stable and had spent his boyhood doing the filthiest, hardest work a stable manager’s son could do.

  As Agnes held hog wire against a post and he swung a hammer with what he hoped wasn’t too much skill, a searing pinprick of pain stabbed the back of his thigh. “A bee!” Agnes called. Then he hit his thumb with the hammer.

  The words he said could have made saltwater boil. The hardest man on the hardest street in London couldn’t have expressed himself better; And since John had been that man during his career with Scotland Yard, what he said came naturally.

  Agnes covered her mouth with both gloved hands and stared at him. He tossed the hammer aside and stuck his thumb between his lips. As he sucked it he cursed himself silently and tried not to grimace with the pain, aside from wanting to scratch the throbbing itch just under the edge of his shorts leg in back.

  John gritted his teeth in a smile. “I apologize.”

  Then he realized, as he studied Agnes’s crinkling eyes, that behind the gloves she was struggling not to laugh. “Don’t,” she said in a strangled voice. “I’m s-sorry, It’s not f-funny.” She made snuffling sounds behind the gloves.

  “Agnes! How could you!”

  “You’
re real. You’re human and real.” She lowered her hands and drew her face into a mask of control. “I’ve never heard a man sound quite so, uh, real, in my whole life. I’m glad. I thought you were too perfect to be true. I feel a whole lot more comfortable now.”

  “I’m glad you enjoyed it.” He felt relieved and surprised.

  She tugged her gloves off, reached over the half-mended fence, and grasped his injured hand carefully. She brought it close. Her smile disappeared and she made a sharp sound of sympathy. “I am sorry. This is terrible.”

  John looked at the blood around his thumbnail with secret appreciation. It was nice to have Agnes fuss over him. It was serving his purpose, making her care about him. And … oh, hell, it was just nice for its own sake.

  “I’m sure I’ll live,” he said bravely.

  “Come on, I’ve got antiseptic and stuff at the house.”

  “No, that would take too much time. I’m fine. Really.”

  “But you’re going to bleed all over my pasture.”

  “No, only in this corner of it.” He liked the cozy way her hands cupped his, and he pulled his hand away reluctantly. “I’ll clean my thumb up a bit, and then we’ll get back to work.” He reached for the tail of his T-shirt.”

  “Wait. Don’t.” She chewed her lower lip for a second, then grumbled something mild under her breath and unbuckled her tool belt. After she let it drop she began unbuckling the slender leather belt that held up her shorts.

  John eyed her askance. “This is an interesting form of first aid.”

  “You’re a lucky man.” But she only loosened the belt a few notches, so that her shorts slid down to the top of her hipbones and hung there in tantalizing jeopardy of falling farther. Her T-shirt covered her stomach, but John glimpsed white panties.

  The panties were waist-high and demure. But the jagged horizontal tear revealing her navel was fantastic.

  “Nice style,” he said, even though a gentleman ought to look away. For the moment, he had to be himself.

  “Dogs got hold of them.” Her rosy cheeks flushed red at the centers as she lifted her shirt’s hem over one hip and quickly grabbed the panties’ waistband. She ripped the thin, cottony material from the band down to parts unseen under her shorts.